ABC and the producers of Charlie's Angels are off the hook
In Hollywood they were calling it Angelgate. It had everything a big production could want: TV stars, starmakers and money—lots and lots of money. But when Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van De Kamp released his long-awaited report on the Charlie's Angels case last week, what had been billed as television's scandal of the decade turned out to be something less than many had expected. "We have determined after careful evaluation of the evidence," said the D.A., "that there are insufficient grounds to institute criminal charges."
Most relieved, of course, were the principal targets of the investigation, Producers Aaron Spelling, 52, and Leonard Goldberg, 46. The two had been accused of trying to cheat investors in ABC's Charlie's Angels, chiefly Actor Robert Wagner, 50, and his actress-wife Natalie Wood, 42, by siphoning off at least $660,000 of Angels 'profits to Starsky and Hutch, a show that the producers owned a larger percentage of. Only slightly less elated were executives at ABC who had approved the transfer of funds and ABC President Elton Rule, 63, a close friend of the two producers. If Van De Kamp failed to make the criminal charges stick, he did provide the closest look out siders have ever had into the wheeling and dealing that goes on to make a TV series.
The investigation began in 1979 after Jennifer Martin, 32, a lawyer in ABC'S West Coast contracts department, pointed out to her boss that for each episode of Charlie's Angels the network was paying Spelling and Goldberg $30,000 for "exclusivity." Why, she asked, should ABC pay for exclusivity when under the terms of an earlier agreement it already had exclusive rights to their services? According to Martin's memo of the meeting, which the D.A. quoted, ABC V.P. Ronald Sunderland, replied: "You want to know what it's really for? They're [cheating] the Robert Wagners out of their money. We've been putting it into Starsky and Hutch up until now, but since Starsky is off the ah", the money's got to go somewhere else, so we're calling it exclusivity."
Shocked by Sunderland's comment, which he complains was misinterpreted,
Martin sent memos fluttering to the top of the ABC Building in Manhattan. The network did two things: it launched its own internal inquiry, and it fired Martin for "unfinished and sloppy work." That ABC investigation found nothing wrong. Apparently concerned that Martin would send her memos to the authorities, however, ABC Counsel Frank Rothman gave his findings to Van De Kamp in October 1979. Since then the TV world has been waiting for the D.A. to pounce. Instead he issued an 81-page report that found the main culprits to be sloppy business practices and a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland bookkeeping.